MONTREAL -- What is cinema? What is our relationship to the camera, to drama and to narrative? These are but a few of the provocative questions asked by Gilles Deroo and Marianne Pistone’s starkly beautiful, challenging debut feature, Mouton.

The film, which screens Saturday and Sunday, won two prizes at Switzerland’s Locarno Film Festival in August and is one of the highlights of this year’s Festival du nouveau cinéma (FNC). It tells the simple story of a lovable, mentally challenged teenage boy nicknamed Mouton (David Merabet), who emerges from the grips of an abusive mother to find his own path working in the kitchen of an upscale seaside restaurant in the north of France.

Shot in a minimalistic, vérité style, the movie lulls us into a false sense of security bordering on reverie, until tragedy strikes. But rather than focus on the drama in a conventional manner, Deroo and Pistone continue to lead us on a floating voyage through the increasingly troubled lives of those in the ill-fated protagonist’s circle.

In town for the FNC, the co-directors said their unique approach began with the writing, before spilling over into every aspect of the filmmaking process. From the outset, they did away with typical script formulae.

“We stopped using ‘interior/exterior, daytime/nighttime’ indications,” Deroo explained. “We stopped using dialogue and included lots of sentiments that are normally useless when directing, that are completely subjective. We wrote what seemed untranslatable in directing, very subtle things.”

“The writing was practically poetic,” Pistone said. “It was very literary. The title of a sequence could be ‘Hope,’ and we would have to find, in reality, things that didn’t exist, intrigues that didn’t exist that could signify hope through cinema, time and movement. It’s transubstantiation, from one medium to another, passing between two different bodies, two things (writing and filmmaking) with completely different natures.”

Mouton is filled with long, seemingly uneventful scenes: of the main character working in the kitchen; experiencing his first romance; employees unloading fish in the early morning hours; locals letting off steam at a traditional celebration; dogs wandering on the beach.

Yet far from redundant, these sequences add up, providing an expansive view of the lives of these people, of the mundanity of their day-to-day existence, and prompting us to more actively question our reaction to the troubling events that take place later on.

“We wanted to make a naturalistic, ensemble film that follows characters in everyday life, moving toward a predetermined destiny,” Pistone said.

The violence comes as a shock in this otherwise understated tale. The fateful event is handled in surprisingly un-sensational fashion, with none of the close-ups, dramatic music or action-focused editing usually accompanying such events on screen.

“I don’t even know if it was the violence (that we were interested in),” Deroo said. “Which brings us to the path of Mouton — we get attached to this character in his daily life. There is something very calm in him before the violence, which is very short and which we didn’t exploit. Then we look at what is left, afterwards.”

The filmmakers’s secret weapon is the camera, used with great restraint to provide an observational, only faintly editorialized view of things, remaining just far enough removed from events to offer perspective while somehow increasing our emotional investment in the proceedings.

“It’s the story of a tragedy, with no escape,” Pistone said. “The camera already knows what is happening, as if it’s omniscient, while leading the character to his destiny, which he welcomes with open arms.

“(French director Robert) Bresson said cinema is about the direction of the gaze, breaking up bodies and dismantling the actor so he or she is no longer a living being walking against a background, but on the same level as objects, things, body parts or the decor. That interests us a lot — to de-psychologize our characters.”

The pair used non-professional actors in the film, favouring their instincts and people’s appearances over acting ability. “We don’t do casting,” Deroo said. “We find a face, which we call a port or an être-monde.”

The desired effect is not only to blur the lines between fiction and reality, but to do away with the theatricality of the filmmaking process. Along the way, they lead their audience toward an alternate viewing experience, where there is a story if you need one but there are also many other things to observe, and ideas to reflect upon.

“In contemporary cinema, the spectator doesn’t often have to go searching for things,” Deroo said. “True upheaval doesn’t happen. But in the films we like most, you come out wondering if you liked it, and you’re not sure. A few days later, you say, ‘Wow, that was a great film.’ ”

Mouton screens Saturday at 1 p.m. and Sunday at 5:15 p.m. at Quartier Latin as part of the Festival du nouveau cinéma. For tickets and information, visit www.nouveaucinema.ca.

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